How this Team Won the LeRobot Hackathon by Folding Shirts and Reimagining Robotics

Team 250, known as Ez_2_AI, won first place in the United States and second globally at Hugging Face’s LeRobot Hackathon by training a low-cost 3D-printed SO100 robot arm to fold T-shirts and prototype medicine sorting for people with limited dexterity. Over a weekend, the three-person team collected 86 folding demonstrations, tested pi0, ACT, and SmolVLA imitation-learning models, and achieved roughly 70% folding success, while also developing an early one-arm pill-box sorting concept. Using Lightning AI’s H100 and A100 GPU infrastructure, they trained SmolVLA for 40,000 steps in two days, addressed video-data loading bottlenecks, recovered from lost camera recordings, and deployed real-time inference with 50–70% folding performance. Their project emerged from a highly active Bay Area event attended within a global competition involving more than 3,000 participants from 44 countries, and the team has published its dataset on Hugging Face while continuing work on both tasks.

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